Proper electronic weirdness on a shared disc from Fat Cat.

We’ve been stuck on the strange world of Katie Gately since discovering her extraordinary voice-manipulating tape Pipes (and self-titled EP) last year, while Tlaotlon’s Ektomists cassette is one of the finest 2014 releases from Vancouver’s always-reliable 1080p label. Naturally, news of a split release between the LA-based sound designer and the New Zealand-via-Melbourne bedroom producer had us letting out a DIY cheer, and FACT has the whole stream of the EP ahead of its release on Fat Cat Records next week.

Gately’s contribution is the 14-minute ‘Pivot’, a beguiling concoction of her warped cherubic vocals and outlandishly gothic percussion, while Tlaotlon offers four tracks of maximalist, intricately detailed electronica created with an Android tablet and a bunch of effects pedals, as he explained to FACT.

“At the time I had my Android tablet almost permanently patched into a mixer that had six auxiliary sends, so I would set up a bunch of FX loops with six or seven pedals and mess around, recording the jams into Reaper,” says producer Jeremy Coubrough. “Then I’d chop everything up and try to assemble something out of it.” In comparison, Ektomists was produced in the box, with no hardware apart from a drum machine.

More broadly, he’s interested in how house and techno “has this kind of bi-polar attitude towards what the future could feel and sound like”, split between an “optimistic utopian future” and “dystopia, the atmosphere of paranoia, surveillance, the loss of identity”.

“I was curious if and how the music could be opened up a little to newer forces,” he adds, like the “flows and floods of digital information” on the internet and wider “non-human forces”.

“It didn’t make sense to me to try and make music that was really on the grid – binary rhythms where the elements have a purely static and repetitive relationship to one another,” Coubrough explains. “I love that shit, no doubt, but it didn’t seem appropriate to what I wanted to hear, or how I felt like the world was, and so that’s where I started when I began doing Tlaotlon stuff. I wanted to try and get a more nebulous, dense and multiplied sense of events and relationships.”

With that in mind, stream the excellent EP in its entirety below. Split Series #23 is out on Fat Cat Records on October 27 – grab it here and read FACT’s interview with Gately on her journey from film and sound design to music.